Bill Hartzer on Search, Marketing, Tech, and Domains.

HTTP to HTTPS Update: 3 Weeks after Moving

August 28, 2014 By Bill Hartzer

As you might recall, about three weeks ago I moved this site from HTTP to HTTPS after Google officially came out and said that HTTPS is a search engine ranking factor. Well, I’d like to report how it’s going so far, and from what I can tell, based on Google Analytics data, I’m very happy that I moved the site from HTTP to HTTPS.

I moved the site on August 8th and 9th, and there were some initial issues that me and my web host had to deal with. But we got it all fixed by the night of the 9th. After 3 weeks, it looks like the site is doing a lot better than it did previously:

— The overall sessions are up 15 percent.
— The number of users hitting the site is up 17 percent.
— The number of page views is up 125 percent.
— Visitors are viewing more pages per session.
— The bounce rate is down 91 percent (which is good).

Here’s some more info Google Analytics, comparing August 9 to today, August 28, 2014, versus the same period previous to August 9th:

I also looked at the search queries that are being reported by Google Webmaster Tools, and the actual search engine rankings were up a bit during my last update. But, at this point, the search engine rankings have leveled off and are up .59 percent. So essentially the rankings are about the same now (they initially were up).

What’s also interesting to note is the page load speed since moving the site to HTTPS. It looks like the site overall is loading a bit slower, but I don’t think that’s a really big deal since the overall traffic is up and continues to see quality traffic to the site. I plan on looking at page speed, and seeing if there’s anything I can do on the server itself to speed it up.

Here’s the graph of page speed timings in Google Analytics. Remember, traffic is up 126 percent:

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